The present invention relates to communication devices for deaf and hard of hearing or assisted user and more specifically to concepts related to 911 or other types of emergency calls for providing captioning services to assisted communication device users.
Phones have been developed that provide captioning services to deaf or hard of hearing persons (e.g., hereafter “assisted users”). To this end, when a hearing user and an assisted user are participating in a voice telephone call, when the hearing user speaks, the hearing user's voice is transmitted to a remote relay where the hearing user's voice is translated into text. The text is transmitted to the assisted user's device where the text is displayed for the assisted user to view, generally at the same time that the hearing user's voice is broadcast to the assisted user to hear.
Some assisted user devices have been developed that can be used as either a regular telephone without text captioning or as a text captioned phone based on preference of an assisted user. These phones are particularly useful for assisted user's that are not completely deaf and that therefore may want captioning some of the time but not all of the time. For instance, a specific assisted user may be able to hear a first hearing user's voice well but not a second hearing user's voice where the first and second hearing user's have distinctly different tones. Devices that can be used as either regular phones or captioned phones are also particularly useful where one or more non-assisted users live with an assisted user and do not need or desire a captioning service.
One issue that has come up with devices that can optionally be used as conventional telephones as well as captioned devices is that assisted user's desire the ability to turn captioning services on and off during an ongoing voice telephone call with a hearing user. For instance, an assisted user may start a call with captioning initially turned off. During the call, the assisted user may start to have difficulty making out a hearing user's voice and therefore may desire to turn on a captioning service. For this reason devices have been developed that enable an assisted user to turn on captioning during an ongoing voice call. In this regard see U.S. Pat. No. 6,603,835 entitled “System For Text Assisted Telephony” which issued on Aug. 5, 2003 and which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
In addition to providing a solution to a preference of at least some assisted users, the optional captioning feature has reduced the overall cost associated with using relays to provide captioning when needed. To this end, instead of always providing the captioning service, captioning is only provided when needed and affirmatively selected by an assisted user.
In addition to being useful for communicating with hearing users under normal circumstances, assisted user devices are also useful for communicating in emergency situations. For instance, an assisted user device is usable to initiate a 911 emergency call at any time so that an assisted user can receive captioning during an emergency call. In the case of devices usable as both a conventional telephone and optionally as a captioning device, in order to expedite captioning service when an emergency occurs and a 911 call is initiated by an assisted user, devices have routinely been set up to automatically provide captioning upon call initiation instead of requiring an affirmative step to start captioning. Thus, when an assisted user dials 911, captioning is automatically initiated regardless of whether or not the assisted user affirmatively selects captioning.
While automatic captioning upon dialing 911 is useful, unfortunately, in use, this feature can cause some confusion. For instance, for an assisted user that is used to selecting the captioning option each time the assisted user places a non-emergency call, the natural inclination upon placing a 911 call is to select the captioning option after dialing 911 despite the fact that captioning is automatically initiated upon dialing 911. The effect of selecting the captioning button after the automatic initiation of captioning is to turn off captioning, the exact opposite of the user's intention. When captioning goes off instead of on as intended upon assisted user selection, the off state can cause additional confusion for an assisted user and hamper communication during an emergency 911 call.
Often 911 calls are disrupted for various reasons and a connection to complete a call has to be re-established. For this reason, when a 911 call is received by an operator, the operator's communication system typically automatically obtains and stores a call back number for the phone used to initiate the 911 call so that, if premature disconnection occurs, the operator can initiate a call back to the phone used to place the original call.
One other problem associated with 911 calls is that, upon a call back after premature 911 disconnection, an assisted user may become more flustered when the call is answered if the call back is simply treated as a conventional non-emergency telephone call without captioning.